[c-nsp] Understanding 10G line card oversubscription

[Phil Mayers]

On 03/21/2011 09:41 PM, Greg Whynott wrote:
> the 6500's are not very well suited for many roles these days in DC land,  especially if your into HPC.    if you are using a policy engine such as the FWSM,  you now only have 4G if your traffic has to pass threw it.  if memory serves me correctly.     We started seeing input drops which lead us to start a deployment OSPF-ECMP so we could balance and route around the core 6500..
>
> kinda sad when you consider the cost of the kit.    we bought a pair of extreme switches last round,  they blow the socks of anything we have had from Cisco (so far!) in terms of features,  performance and cost of ownership.
>
> just my opinion,  i may be way off base.

Well, I think it depends on what you're doing.

It is certainly a poor platform for high-density 10gig. Many caveats and 
cost is way, way too high. Transceiver tedium too :o(

Having said that, the truly tragic thing about the 6500 is that, until 
recently, it still beat a lot of newer platforms on feature mix combined 
with decent performance and reasonable (if not great) density.

It's entirely possible that we just have a very weird mix of 
requirements, but I'm honestly not looking forward to replacing our 
6500s - it's not obvious to me we can get the same feature mix, better 
performance and good cost in a single device, which means a 
re-architect, as well as higher cost in carrying spares :o(

Having said that, I won't be sorry to see the back of the crappy CPU and 
12.2S IOS train ;o)